Monthly Archives: November 2001

On Monday night we have our exciting Knitting Factory show at 7pm. We had a really great practice on Saturday, and I think it will be a lot of fun.

I’ve been making up for my recent lack of new CD purchases. I picked up three new things at Sounds. I feel blessed in NYC that we have the CD stores on St. Mark’s place. I ended paying around $42 with tax for the three discs, which isn’t for nothing, but represents a saving of around $20 over say Tower or Virgin.

I also finally made it to the WFMU record fair, where I managed to pick up 8 albums, even though I hadn’t intended to get anything particularly. No less than four of these were library/advertising records. One red vinyl record from the 60s has a song and brief ad spots for Merckel Meats, set to jaunty late 50s style ‘TV Dinner’ music. The three albums I got on the ‘Robert Hall Productions’ label were all great. Two of them were exlusively sound effects – one has animal sounds on one side, and space/electronic sounds on the other, while the other is all space/ghost sounds, including a track called ‘water samba’. The final record is called simply ‘production music’, and has tracks such as ‘pete gunner m.t.’, ‘cool tension’, ‘bongo blues’, ‘hip chick’, ‘wild party’, ‘feeling high’, ‘125th st’ and ‘cold turkey’. Very cool stuff; some of it sounds like early 60s jazz, while later on it gets quite funky, so I’m guessing this was made in the late 60s. This should keep me going for a while.

The performance was fun, although rather low-key. The movie we performed to was in fact ‘The Blob‘.

In other news, I realized today that it has been at least one, maybe two weeks since I bought either a record or a CD. Shocking stuff.

So, in the absence of music, books. I’m really enjoying reading Peter Handke’s ‘A moment of True Feeling’, in ‘2 X Handke. It’s rather haunting, and reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre. Before that, I also really enjoyed Knut Hamsun’s ‘Mysteries. Other books I recall enjoying this year include Martin Amis’s autobiography, ‘Experience‘, Haruki Murakami’s ‘Sputnik Sweetheart‘. Funny, I never buy from amazon, but in doing these searches I notice they’ve finally made an effort to make the prices low enough that with shipping, it costs the same or less than buying it at the bookstore. Before, they never did this, and I was baffled as to why people would ever buy from there when it amounted to paying two to five dollars extra per book.

Monday night at 7pm, The Isolators, formerly known as Stretcher Case, will play the Knitting Factory‘s Knitactive Sound Stage. Please make sure you are there.